Owlspotting

I was doing my normal morning rounds of the media blogs and came across a Media Shift reference to a blog that tracks last place finishes in the Torino Olympics. Funny, I said, until I started reading this blog more closely. It turns out that next to documenting the pains of athletes coming in last, the blog also ranks countries according to the number of last place finishes.

Who is currently leading that ranking with a couple Olympic days left? You got it, Romania (see graphic below).

With 33 athletes at these games, Romania has so far managed to place last five times. We are followed closely as you can see below by Ukraine, China, South Korea and Japan — all of which have more athletes at the games.

This is almost as good a story as Steaua and Rapid bulldozing opponents in the UEFA Cup or American autistic basketball player Jason McElwain scoring six consecutive three pointers in less than four minutes.

Update (Feb. 27): Now that the Olympics are over, the final tallies are in. Romania added one more last place finish and kept the top spot with six. China and Japan also had six last place finishes, but they had many more athletes.